France has passed will vote next week on a new bill that makes it a crime to promote extreme thinness. Breaking the law is punishable with actual jail time. If the bill is passed, it will be the first anti-anorexia law in the world. Although several fashion houses and magazines have created their own standards to promote a more healthy body weight, never before has it been potentially legislated by a government.

The world’s first use of the law to tackle eating disorders is broadly aimed at the media and fashion world, but especially at the websites and blogs of the so-called pro-ana movement. While many are support groups, others promote starvation as a “life-style choice”, with girls and young women posting their wasting images as “thinspiration” for others. Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace have come under pressure in Britain and other countries recently to ban their pro-ana entries.

Last month a website that originated in France caused an outcry for encouraging children as young as 9 to embrace plastic surgery and extreme dieting in the search for the perfect figure. The Miss Bimbo site invites users to create a virtual doll, keep it “waif thin” with diet pills and buy it breast implants and facelifts. The website attracted 1.2 million players in France.

[From the Times Online]

Breaking the proposed law could result in fines as high as $48,000 and up to a two year prison sentence for members of the fashion world that “provoke a person to seek excessive thinness by encouraging prolonged restriction of nourishment” if it risks damaging a person’s health or could cause death. The sentence is raised to $70,000 and three years in jail if someone dies.

Some experts and fashion leaders oppose the Bill, which is expected to be passed by Parliament within months. “You do not solve this kind of problem with the law but with understanding,” Jean-Paul Gaultier, the designer, said. Didier Grumbach, head of the French Couture Federation, said it was not up to the state to legislate on beauty and aesthetic criteria.

[From the Times Online]

This is an interesting idea, though it seems like there are still a lot of holes in the law bill. For instance, let’s say Teenage Girl A dies from anorexia. Like most teenagers, she read a lot of fashion magazines which have very thin models. She also occasionally visited pro-ana websites. Who is responsible? And how can the government nail down WHICH magazines? And who at that magazine is the criminal? What about websites – is every pro-ana website Teenage Girl A ever visited responsible for her death? Is the responsible party the person who owns the website, or their ISP? It seems like an interesting start, but judges will probably need to figure out exactly how to define “excessive thinness,” and how to hold people accountable.

The header photo is from Italian fashion line Nolita. They used a picture of an anorexic woman on leaflets they handed out during Italy’s fashion week that say “No Anorexia.” This image was banned in France.

Update by Celebitchy: Thanks to Bellatrix for letting us know that this law has not yet passed yet, and is only a proposed bill. She writes:

“The law has not been voted yet. It is still just a law proposition. It will be voted next week on Tuesday (April 15).
I thought you’d might like a check about that, so here’s a link to an online version the “Le Monde” newspaper” [link is in French]

“The law proposition has been made by Valérie Boyer, a UMP (the party of the French president) politician. Needless to say that “la gauche” (the left wing) is united against this law as it does not treat anorexia as an illness and will not solve it.” [E-mail from Bellatrix]

It turns out Prince fancies himself an artist. I fancy him a giant, shrieking hamster with a funny shaped guitar who used to have a symbol for a name. Well, the precious “artiste” is flaming mad at the internet. He’s filing suit against YouTube, eBay, and a bunch of other big internet sites to “reclaim his art on the Internet.” I really think it’s pretentious of him to call what he does art, but for some reason I have a real hatred of Prince that I’m going to try to push aside while I write this article. Prince thinks that a site like YouTube can keep his videos off the internet, because they can keep other equally offensive content off their site.

“YouTube … are clearly able (to) filter porn and pedophile material but appear to choose not to filter out the unauthorized music and film content which is core to their business success,” a statement released on his behalf said.

[From Yahoo]

If YouTube can filter out offensive, useless crap like porn, why can’t they filter out offensive, useless crap like Prince’s videos? Whatever PR flaky wrote that statement was just asking to be made fun of. Prince is really biting the hand that feeds him. When was the last time he had a hit album or even a hit single? I think he should take whatever crumbs he can get. YouTube can also be a great way for an artist to market and promote themselves for next to nothing. And frankly, that could only help Prince.

“YouTube responded by saying it was working with artists to help them manage their music on the site. ‘Most content owners understand that we respect copyrights, we work every day to help them manage their content, and we are developing state-of-the-art tools to let them do that even better,’ said YouTube chief counsel Zahavah Levine. ‘We have great partnerships with major music labels all over the world that understand the benefit of using YouTube as another way to communicate with their fans.’”

[From Yahoo]

Along with YouTube, Prince is suing eBay and a website called Pirate Bay, a torrent-based site that lets users illegally download music, movies, games, and applications. I understand suing Pirate Bay, as they help you search for illegal content. Torrents are kind of confusing, but my best, quick summary is that the sites you find torrents on don’t host them, and you download the content in small packets of information from several places. In terms of eBay… that seems a little unwise. They’re not handing out intellectual property for free or anything. People have apparently been using Prince’s image on coffee mugs, wall clocks, mouse pads, and other equally useless crap that no one cares about.

“‘Prince strongly believes artists as the creators and owners of their music need to reclaim their art,’ the statement added. British company Web Sheriff has been hired to help coordinate the action. ‘In the last couple of weeks we have directly removed approximately 2,000 Prince videos from YouTube,’ said Web Sheriff managing director John Giacobbi. ‘The problem is that one can reduce it to zero and then the next day there will be 100 or 500 or whatever. This carries on ad nauseam at Prince’s expense,’ he told Reuters. He said his company had also removed around 300 items from eBay, where whole lines of pirated goods trading on Prince’s name had appeared, including clocks, socks, mugs and key rings.”

[From Yahoo]

Prince, if there’s someone out there that wants to buy your face on a coffee mug from eBay, let them. They probably like you enough to have bought a few of your CDs too. YouTube is generally fan-based. It’s probably not super-wise to piss off the last 12 fans you have. Sorry, my seething dislike is boiling through again. If nothing else, this stuff is hard to stop. It seems best to work with the companies (not Pirate Bay, but the others) to try to put your content on there yourself legally. If it’s on the site, that means there’s a market for it and people want it. Instead of suing them, why don’t you work together? If you go to YouTube, you can find official videos from lots of artists and major networks. That way everyone is happy and you don’t look like a prissy little metallic-covered hamster. Sorry, it slipped through again.

Picture note by JayBird: Here’s Prince at the Bourne Ultimatum UK Premiere. Images thanks to PR Photos.